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Tuesday, March 08, 2016

The Beauty of Bees And Self-Reliance: A Conversation with Author Susan Brackney

Hello Local Food Readers,

Local Food Bloomington is delighted to introduce our readers to Becky Holtzman.

The Beauty of Bees And
Self-Reliance: A Conversation with Author Susan Brackney

For ten years, from the mid-90s to
mid-2000s, Brackney moved every single year. As a student earning her
Bachelors in English at IU, the annual moves were not so unusual. But
after graduating, she still found herself moving from one awful
rental to another. Landlords aren’t typically amenable to allowing
renters to dig garden plots, so she had abundant—but
unsatisfying—container gardens; her spare time was spent reading
about homesteading. As Brackney says, she was “pining for land.”
Her first homestead was an 850 square foot house on a half-acre
inside the city limits.

“My realtor explained that a property
like this was only a step above camping, but there were these huge
old walnut trees….” (You can hear affection for those trees in
her voice.) Family helped build a 144 square foot greenhouse, which
was cozy on snowy winter days. Brackney started growing much of her
own food, canning, and cultivating loofah gourds.

“Because,” she says, “why not?”

Brackney really wanted chickens, but a
civic battle was raging at the time: chickens were personae non
gratae inside the city limits. Honeybees, however, were
considered to be “invertebrate livestock.” When a friend gifted
her the beekeeping equipment he found at a yard sale, a beekeeper was
born.

Brackney has an of her great-grandfather and grandfather peering
into a hive, knee-deep in summer grass. She’s not sure that any
beekeeping skills were passed down to her, though. In fact, she
ruefully laughs about being beehive-less this winter, following major
bee challenges last autumn.

“Have you ever experienced laying
workers?” she asks, laughing. “That was a hot mess of a
hive.” Laying workers are an unholy disaster, in which the female
worker bees decide the queen is no longer up to the job of laying
eggs, and start laying their own—unfertilized—eggs. This results
in a bunch of (mostly) useless drones, and spells the demise of the
hive. Brackney tried the “shake out and forget” trick, dumping the laying workers away from the
hive, but to no avail. February 2016 finds Brackney bee-less, but
planning for spring.

“My beekeeping mentor was very old
school—he had many, many tricks up his sleeve for ‘working the
girls,’ as he put it, to maximize honey production. I’m more
hands-off.” Brackney says she’s not in it for the honey, and that
she’s more likely to put her ear up to one of her hives and give a
it a gentle knock, listening for the bees inside, than she is to open
it and start poking around.

“Opening a hive is like cracking open
a chest for heart surgery. I really don’t want to, unless
absolutely necessary.”

Bees boast a social structure that’s
both fluid and organized, with most bees having the chance to work at
different jobs during different life stages. The youngest bees care
for brood, graduate to housekeeping, serve a stint as an undertaker
hauling out dead bees, and then move on to foraging in the wider
world. Some bees become entrance guards. A honeybee sting means death
for the insect, and it’s their last resort when feeling threatened;
a honeybee will typically buzz an intruder several times before
stinging.

Brackney maintains that discretion is
an important skill in beekeeping: while immediate neighbors
absolutely should know there’s a beekeeper at work, ideally the
bees are managed so efficiently that nobody even knows it’s
happening. Checking bees during the week, when neighbors are at work,
is a great way to stay on the down low. If one diligently keeps the
hive from swarming, and gives away plenty of honey, chances are good
that bees will be welcome in the neighborhood.

The pollination of local gardens and
orchards is an added benefit of keeping bees. Large commercial
orchards—think the acres of almond trees in California, or the
orange groves in Florida—truck in mass quantities of beehives
seasonally, paying thousands of dollars for pollination services. In
fact, this is how many larger-scale beekeepers make their primary
income; honey and beeswax are secondary products.

I once heard an older beekeeper, one of
the gentlest men I’ve ever met, insist that the way to restore the
honeybee is to train thousands more hobby beekeepers, and not have so
many giant commercial beekeepers. Who knows if that would do the
trick, but many scientists do think that large-scale commercial
beekeeping has helped contribute to honeybee decline, by encouraging
the spread of disease to already-stressed-by-travel colonies.

Small is sweet.

The more we can do for ourselves and
our communities (human and ecological), the better, and everyone
benefits when we invest in our local foodshed Brackney points out that the expensive spinach
trucked in from California has lost some of its nutritional value by
the time it gets to our plates. Paying a bit more for locally grown
food that is in the prime of its nutrient-rich life might save us
more in the long run, from the fossil fuels used for transport, tothe value of keeping our dollars in local circulation, to the
personal well-being we support when we eat the freshest food
possible.

As for the honeybees: you don’t have
to keep a hive to support these hard-working pollinators. You can
plant blossoms that bees love, in large swaths of your yard.
Honeybees practice flower constancy, which means that once a bee
finds a flower variety she likes, she’ll work it until there’s
nothing left, to the exclusion of other plants. Make it worth her
while to visit your yard. Susan created this awesome garden map to give you ideas, and it’s great for welcoming
pollinators of all

kinds, including native bees and even
hummingbirds. You can also provide a water dish – a shallow saucer
with small pebbles for bees to perch on will do. And naturally,
you’ll want to stay away from herbicides and insecticides that can
harm bees.

Beekeeping is a humbling art—the
“right” answers are sometimes elusive, and often you just do the
best you can, that moment. Brackney confesses she’s not religious,
but when she looks inside a beehive, with its order and systems, she
feels awe.

“It’s hard not to believe something
powerful is at work,” she sighs. By supporting the bees in their
efforts, we all can participate in that “something powerful.”

Becky Holtzman is a painter and Reiki practitioner in Bloomington,
Indiana. A keeper-of-bees from 2011-2015,
she hopes to have a beehive or two in the near future. You can find her art
at beckytomato.com and
her Reiki practice at orangeflowerhealing.com.